As if it’s not bad enough that “Stalin” Mugabe created a famine, now his ideological brothers want to keep the affected people from receiving food aid. I’m endlessly disgusted by the way collectivists eagerly promote suffering and death as long as their ideology is advanced in doing so.

“We want the freedom to grow what we want, when we want, with what technology we want, and without trade-distorting subsidies or tariffs,” said Barun Mitra, an Indian farm activist leading about 30 farmers from his country. [Reuters]

This has been pretty much ignored by the US media–even here it’s only a few paragraphs of a longer story. Still, it’s nice to know that there are some voices of sanity present, even if they are mostly drowned out by Tranzi propaganda.

bq. It’s hard to think of an ideal propounded with more fervor on our nation’s campuses than that of diversity. So it is with more than passing interest that we noticed a new study confirming that when it comes to the political allegiances of college faculties, there is no such animal.

The study looks at party registration for faculty members, and divides them into right and left. I do object to their inclusion of Libertarians as “right”–the people who did the study seem to have missed the point a bit there. However, it’s irrelevant to the results of the study, because nearly all faculty members belong to left parties.

Brad Pettit: “As for Lawrence Lessig’s romanticized notions of MORE (‘many who share my affection for this clean bit of code’), and for those who think the MORE source should be placed in public domain, be forewarned.” [Scripting News]

He answered the question of what happened to the MORE source:

By the time Doug left (being the last of the real LVT devs) after shipping MORE 3 (The David Whitney era), Symantec had given up. There was 3.1 that fixed a few bugs, and a feature I added for a special build supposedly used by one of the Hubble developers (ORA, for “their” bug fix). When I left Symantec for Apple, while on the Mac ACT! team, I archived the MORE source code and dev environment to a drive and gave it to my manager in case it was ever needed. “Just run this script.”

A few years ago, Symantec asked me where they could find the code (how f-ing irresponsible is that?). I never could quite understand because the source for every release, on multiple floppies, was to have been in some vault somewhere. Go figure. Anyway, they were going to show the source to an outside party, but I don’t know why. They tracked it down when I told them about the drive.

Newton’s Return: A Hit and a Myth. A pair of consumer behaviorists is studying the Newton community as a case study of a ‘brand community.’ They are particularly interested in the recurrent rumor of the Newton’s return. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

I took part in that study myself, back in February. I still have my answers to their questions somewhere, I’ll see about posting them here.

Apple’s Newton Just Won’t Drop. Apple killed the Newton handheld computer in 1998. It should have gone away, but thousands of fans still use it and keep its applications current. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

This is a thorough, well-researched article with only minor technical errors. The author also wrote about HyperCard two weeks ago–he seems to have an interest in advanced technology that was Steved.

I’m a little dubious about what Dave is saying. He addresses why, in his opinion, Symantec killed MORE in the first place when he says this:

Symantec made a bet that the team would stay at the company. But that didn’t work out. And without the developers (key point) the source was worthless. A lot of non-engineers don’t get this, but that doesn’t change it.

That may or may not be true–and Dave is in a position to know–but saying that nobody but the original team could use the source says, something rather bad about the original team.

In any case, this has nothing to do with Symantec’s current position on MORE. I’ve worked at Symantec for several years, and I’ve asked around about where the source to MORE is, just because I’m curious about it. Nobody in the Mac group knows–I’m not even sure the company still has it.

I can state with absolute certainty that the company has no interest in MORE or any other productivity app. Every time people talk about what new products the Mac group should develop, I always suggest that we revive MORE–and people always laugh at me. In fact, as far as I know I’m the only Symantec employee who even uses it. The current management envisions Symantec as a “security” company, and MORE does not fit that vision.

It’s possible that if the source does exist somewhere Symantec might be willing to sell the product. That did happen with Act! after all. Somebody has to offer to buy it for that to happen, though. So if any ambitious programmers out there really want to see MORE developed further, try putting your money where your mouth is. It can’t hurt to try!

Libertarian Arrested In Arizona For Displaying Protest Sign at Televised Debate. Joe Duarte, a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress, was arrested on Sunday, August 25, for displaying a hand-held paper sign protesting the League of Women Voters’ unlawful exclusion of Libertarian candidates from a televised gubernatorial debate at Pima Community College in Tucson. Duarte was advised by police at the event that he must either leave the debate venue or stop displaying his sign. When he refused, he was handcuffed and removed. [Sierra Times]

He also mentions HyperCard and the Newton. In the case of products which have been deliberately killed by the corporation that owns them, despite the wishes of their users, there’s something to be said for the idea of setting them free after ten years.